Pieco

09/23/2011

Thunderdome

"Mad Max" showed us that the design needs some refinement. But since we received some prototype boards for this design, we decided to do a quick follow up to Max. We're calling it "Thunderdome".

We did our first attempt at homebrew surface mount, and it went quite well. But since we now know that the Max series is a dead evolutionary branch, we just glued the new circuit board on the outside and moved on. But we also learned a few more things in the process.

Although it shouldn't be a big surprise, the surface mount version of our circuit is much, much more efficient. It's also much prettier than what we did with Max.

We also found that we're just using the wrong power chip, and that's going to change with the next revision.

But we did manage to produce the most expensive Kindle light ever made. I guess that's progress of some sort.